Funds scarce for U.S. to export freedom
Outside Middle East, American efforts lag
By Peter Baker
Updated: 11:21 p.m. ET March 17, 2005

In the weeks after a popular uprising toppled a corrupt government in
Ukraine, President Bush hailed the so-called Orange Revolution as proof
that democracy was on the march and promised $60 million to help secure
it in Kiev. But Republican congressional allies balked and slashed it
this week to $33.7 million.

The shrinking financial commitment to Ukrainian democracy highlights a
broader gap between rhetoric and resources among budget writers in the
Bush administration and on Capitol Hill as the president vows to devote
his second term to "ending tyranny in our world," according to budget
documents, congressional critics and democracy advocates.

The administration has pumped substantial new funds into promoting
democracy in Muslim countries but virtually nowhere else in the world.
The administration has cut budgets for groups struggling to build civil
society and democratic institutions in Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia,
even as Moscow has pulled back from democracy and governments in China,
Burma, Uzbekistan and elsewhere remain among the most repressive in the
world.


• Special report: The Bush administration
Funding for the National Endowment for Democracy has remained flat for
the past two years except in the Middle East, while separate
democracy-building programs have been slashed by 38 percent in Eastern
Europe and 46 percent in the former Soviet Union during Bush's
presidency. The venerable beacons of American-style democracy, Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, are receiving no sizable
increases.

Lorne W. Craner, who until recently was assistant secretary of state for
democracy, human rights and labor, said the shifting priorities are a
logical byproduct of the post-Sept. 11 world, in which fostering
democracy in Muslim communities came to be seen as a means to combat
terrorism.

"People in other regions for two or three years after 9/11 said, 'You're
not giving us as much attention as we deserve,' and I think that was a
fair critique and the reason was we were creating a whole new policy for
the Middle East," Craner said. "A lot of people's time was taken up by
the Middle East that, but for 9/11, would have gone to other areas. Is
that a bad thing? I don't think so. Certainly I would say we needed to
pay more attention to the Middle East."

The focus on Iraq, he added, will be critical to setting a role model
for other regions as well. "If Iraq doesn't work," he said, "a lot of
people are going to say, 'Is that what you mean by democracy?' "

But others took issue with the selective aid. "The president is not
putting his money where his mouth is," said Tom Malinowski, Washington
director of Human Rights Watch. While giving Bush credit for investing
in democracy in the Middle East, he added, "There are just big
country-by-country, region-by-region differences when it comes to the
administration's commitment to democracy promotion."

"There are a number of countries that aren't getting much democracy
aid," said Thomas Carothers, director of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace's project on democracy and the rule of law.
Carothers pointed to mass arrests of protesters seeking restoration of
democracy in Nepal this week. "There are places like that where we're
losing because they're on the edge of the world and people aren't paying
attention."

Widespread funding cuts
Among groups that will lose out is the Asia Foundation, which works to
reform legal codes, foster civil society and promote women's rights in
places such as Indonesia, where it is credited with helping the
transition from decades of dictatorship. The Bush budget for the 2006
fiscal year cuts the foundation's grant from $13 million to $10 million.
"Any cut at that level would be very difficult for our program," said
Nancy Yuan, a foundation vice president.

Also facing cuts is the Eurasia Foundation, which has been told that the
final installment of a $25 million grant to set up a
U.S.-European-Russian democracy program in Russia may be delayed despite
President Vladimir Putin's moves to clamp down on political opposition.
"We can't give up," said Charles William Maynes, president of the
Eurasia Foundation. "It would be disastrous if we do."

The International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic
Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the main U.S. agencies that
teach political activists how to conduct fair elections, devote about
half of their budgets to Iraq and the Middle East, according Craner, who
is now IRI president.

Measuring how much Washington spends on democracy promotion is difficult
because the money is scattered among programs and much of it is embedded
in grants by the U.S. Agency for International Development. But recent
trends have been clear. USAID spending on democracy and governance
programs alone shot up from $671 million in 2002 to $1.2 billion in
2004, but almost all of that increase was devoted to Iraq and
Afghanistan. Without those two countries, the USAID democracy spending
in 2004 was $685 million, virtually unchanged from two years earlier.

Bush broadened his focus beyond the Middle East in his second inaugural
address when he issued a manifesto to promote democracy around the
globe, declaring it U.S. policy "to seek and support the growth of
democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture."

The budget he submitted to Congress two weeks later, however, included
no huge new investment in such institutions beyond the Muslim world.
The National Endowment for Democracy, which funds the IRI, the NDI and
other programs, received $80 million, twice its budget of two years ago,
but the entire $40 million increase went to Bush's Middle East democracy
initiative, leaving everything else flat. Voice of America received an
extra $10 million, but it was devoted to expanding programs in Persian,
Dari, Urdu and Pashtu aimed at non-Arabic Muslim listeners. The only
other broadcasts to get major funding increases were those aimed at
Cuba, which went from $27 million to $37.9 million.
At the same time, funding for the Support for East European Democracy
Act was sliced by an additional $14 million, to $382 million. The
largest part of this program is aimed at Serbia, still in transition
from the era of Slobodan Milosevic. And funding for the Freedom Support
Act focusing on Russia and 11 other former Soviet republics was slashed
by $78 million, to $482 million, down from $894 million in 2002.

‘Not well organized right now’
"The U.S. government is not well organized right now to realize the
administration's rhetoric on democracy," said Jennifer Windsor,
executive director of Freedom House, an organization that promotes
democracy abroad.

The cuts to the Freedom Support Act have drawn criticism from Senate
Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.); his
panel this month adopted a statement urging the administration "to
consider the harm its proposed cuts in funding assistance could have on
U.S. interests in stability, democracy and market reform" in the region.

The funding reductions come at a time when such programs have enjoyed
successes in Georgia and Ukraine, where U.S.-trained activists helped
push out unpopular governments. To help consolidate the gains, Bush
attached $60 million for Ukraine to his supplemental appropriation bill
funding the war in Iraq, with money earmarked to promote judicial
independence, youth participation in politics, legal protections for
press freedom and preparations for parliamentary elections.

But even as Bush plans to host new Ukrainian President Viktor
Yushchenko, the House cut the funding request nearly in half.

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on
foreign operations, said he focused on programs that will help
Yushchenko in the short term and promised to revisit Ukraine in upcoming
budget deliberations for fiscal 2006.

"There's finite resources," Kolbe said. "There's never enough to do what
you want to do, but I think we're making a good effort."

BBC Reveals US Plans for Iraq's oil
The BBC's Newsnight program has revealed that plans for war and for
Iraq's oil were drawn up by the Bush administration before the 9/11
attacks, sparking a split within the White House between two opposing
factions on policy.
The program shows how planning began "within weeks" of Bush's taking
office in 2001, prior to the September 11th attack on the US
The investigation sheds light on plans which were crafted by
neo-conservatives aiming to use Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel by
means of massive increases in production above Opec quotas.
Source: news.bbc.co.uk

You have to admit that this fits all the little details better than any
other explanation, the secret energy meetings, and Paul O'Neil's story.

It was an attempt to destroy OPEC.